Darling (26 page)

“Talk to me,” Lind said, losing her patience.

“What would you like me to tell you?”
Korpivaara asked tiredly, looking at Lind. “About the cell, the sleepless nights, or what it feels like when your head hurts so much no medicine will relieve the pain? Hell, I feel like it’s gonna explode.”

“I want you to tell me about this case.”

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

“Yes, there is,” Lind said tersely, her tone resembling a wife’s reprimand.

“Nothing new about it. I killed the girl.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Yes, I did.”

“The fingerprints,” Lind began, letting out a small laugh. “You knew full well that Laura’s coffeemaker wasn’t turned on
using the switch, but by plugging it in.”

Korpivaara
’s eyes lit up faintly. “Yeah, I knew that. At first I didn’t remember it, and by the time I did, it didn’t matter anyway.”

“What does that mean?”

“Exactly what I said.”

“I
don’t understand, so please explain,” Lind said, leaning forward.

“How did you hear about that?”
Korpivaara asked, now interested.

Lind hadn’t told Jorma
yet about her visit to the other Nӓyttelijӓ Street apartment the night before. Now was the time.

“Sini Rentola-Lammi.”

“What about her?” Korpivaara asked, startled. “Shit…”

“Sini called me and told me you were at her place that morning.”

Korpivaara looked agonized. “You weren’t supposed to talk to her.”

“I wouldn’t have found her if she hadn’t called me. She wants to give you an alibi.”

“Fuck.”

“Don’t you get it? She can get you out of this cell.”

“She’s full of shit. She’s lying,” Korpivaara said, waving his hand. “A load of shit.”

Lind was silent for a minute.

“Listen, Jorma. I believe Sini over you.”

“I already said it. At first I couldn’t remember, but when I did, I realized this was better for everyone.”

“Not for you. You’ll sit in prison for years, innocent.”

“Maybe five years. I can take it.”

“I think it’s wrong.”

Korpivaara
looked Lind straight in the eye and said, “So was what your father did to me.”

“I
know. I’m truly sorry, if that makes any difference.”

“You don’t have a clue.”

Lind wanted to cry. “But I want to help you—so you don’t get another shitty deal.”

“Why did you tell your old man we had sex?”
Korpivaara asked, looking at Lind with piercing eyes. “We didn’t do anything.”

Lind buried her face in her hands. “I know. I’ve always regretted it. He pressured me and threatened to hit me if I didn’t tell him everything. So I told him what he wanted to hear… I’m…I’m so sorry,” Lind said, looking up. Tears were streaming down her face.

“Your old man called me and wanted to talk about our future. I rang the doorbell and he punched me in the face as soon as he opened the door. No warning. I couldn’t do anything. Please, Nea, don’t help me anymore,” Korpivaara said quietly. “I’m serving the sentence and that’s it. If you keep investigating, I’ll switch attorneys… Don’t pull Sini into this.”

Lind wiped her face with the back of her hand.

“Who killed Laura Vatanen?”

No answer.

* * *

Joutsamo held the phone to her ear, standing by the door of the
VCU’s conference room. The two o’clock meeting was about to start.

“No, I don’t have time now…
Later. Try to understand. I’m about to walk into a meeting… No, not your case… I really can’t listen right now. Call me tomorrow,” Joutsamo said and hung up. Attorney Lind was relentless, but Joutsamo really didn’t have time right now.

Joutsamo stepped into the room where a dozen officers in
civilian clothes were already seated. Takamäki had asked his group to come in, so Kulta, Kohonen, and Suhonen were there, too. Nyberg was comfortably soaking in a spa somewhere and would be back tomorrow.

Pekka Mӓkelӓ
, a fifty-year-old detective with glasses and a mustache had driven over from Turku, along with one of his investigators, Hanna Vuori. Joutsamo had never met Mӓkelӓ or the austere-looking Vuori.

Jaakko Nyk
änen represented the National Bureau of Investigation. Nykänen, sporting a walrus mustache, used to be in Takamӓki’s unit before being promoted to detective lieutenant in the Espoo PD and then moving on to the National Bureau of Investigation. Joutsamo knew Nykänen well from her time in Espoo, where she was one of his investigators.

O
ther somber-looking men were in the room. The forty-year-old Risto Miettinen in a gray cardigan was from the Violent Crimes Unit of Eastern Uusimaa, east of Helsinki. He was present because the body was found in his precinct. Joutsamo had seen him in the course of a few investigations and respected him.

Takamäki glanced at his watch. It was three minutes before two, but since everyone was there, they could start. Joutsamo had printed a photo of Maiju Rahkola and attached it on the whiteboard with a magnet. Next to the picture were the words that Joutsamo
obtained from the missing persons report: “Disappeared June 17, 2010 in Turku. Seen at a party in the evening; no sign of her since.”

“Okay,” Takamäki began. “Based on the preliminary information, the bo
dy found in the woods is that of Maiju Rahkola. Of course we can’t be one hundred percent certain, but this is our starting point.”

The
investigation was multidimensional; the body that disappeared in Turku was found in the city of Vantaa by the Helsinki Police. With Turku being a hundred miles west of Helsinki, and Vantaa twelve miles northeast, the three cities formed a slanted triangle. The case appeared complicated, so the NBI was also interested. And the distance from the crime scene to NBI headquarters was less than five miles.

Technically, the Turku
PD was in charge, since the missing persons report was filed there. The officers agreed that Takamäki would chair the meeting, and they would later decide who would head the investigation.

“Forensic
s is on the scene,” Takamäki began. “We have units from Helsinki, Eastern Uusimaa, and the NBI, and a physician from the Medical Examiner’s Office. We don’t have a lot of information yet, which is understandable since the body was found only three hours ago. At this point we don’t even have an educated guess as to whether Maiju Rahkola was killed in the woods or if her body was hidden there afterward. The cause of death is also unknown… And yes, we strongly suspect that the body is Maiju Rahkola’s, but we don’t know for sure.”

“What do we know about the disappearance?” Takamäki asked, looking at the guys from Turku.

“We don’t know much,” Mӓkelӓ said apologetically. “On June 17 she went bar-hopping in downtown Turku with a couple of her friends. She was only seventeen, but she looked older and had no problem getting in, which is usually the case with attractive girls. Her friends saw her last in Restaurant Galax sometime after midnight. That’s the last sign of her.”

“No phone calls or anything?” asked
Nykänen from the NBI.

“No. We heard about the disappearance two days later when her parents got worried. At first
it wasn’t considered a homicide, but a typical runaway teenager. She was expected to return in the next few days. We got her cell phone info, but her phone was turned off somewhere downtown about the time of the disappearance. After she’d been missing for two weeks, we published that photo,” Mӓkelӓ said, pointing to the picture on the board. “We checked the security videos downtown and stopped by a few known drug nests, but she had disappeared into thin air.”

Joutsamo’s cell phone beeped and she checked the text: “
Korpivaara is not the killer. Positively. –Lind.”

Yeah, sure, Joutsamo thought and didn’t reply.

Mӓkelӓ from Turku pulled a file out of his bulging briefcase and set it on the table. The name Rahkola was written on it in red marker.

“This is all the material we’ve accumulated in the case. It
was put on the back burner that summer because of a couple other cases, but we’ve revisited it a few times with no progress.”

So, basically,
insubstantial investigating, Joutsamo thought. They weren’t taking the disappearance seriously. No body, no homicide.

“Actually, we thought the girl had drowned in the river and her body would show up at some point,”
Mӓkelӓ continued. “The problem is that the Aura River runs into the Gulf of Finland and the body could end up there.”

“Yeah
sure,” Nykänen said. “The Vantaa River is only a mile from where the body was found, so it could’ve gotten there by first floating in the Gulf of Finland, and then up the Vantaa River…”

Kulta
scoffed at the comment but didn’t say anything. When the big guns talk, lowly detectives should keep quiet.

“That’s
not good,” Takamäki said. “Let’s try to keep the jokes funny at least… So, we don’t have much information on the disappearance. We’ll have to revisit that. What about the discovery of the body?”

“Yeah. I went into the woods based on the tip and found the body after a bit of shoveling,” Suhonen said.

“Can you be more specific?” Takamäki asked.

“Sure
. An ex-inmate I know had a heart attack, and I went to visit him in the hospital. He told me his former cell mate had told him about a dead body hidden in the woods. According to him, the cell mate had heard it from someone else.”

“Give us names—otherwise we can’t keep up,”
Nykänen inserted.

“I won’t disclose
the name of my informant, but Takamäki knows it. My buddy had heard the story from Lauri Korhonen who got run over by a train a couple of weeks ago.”

“That’s a familiar name,”
Nykänen said. “Korhonen ran some meth deals in Espoo in his day.”

“Yeah, but he’s dead now,” Suhonen said. “I checked
his record. So Korhonen wasn’t the killer; it was his cell mate. My informant only knew his nickname, Nortti. And he couldn’t remember exactly when they were in prison together.”

“Nortti,”
Nykänen said, mulling over the name. “Now we just need to know if it was red or green,” he joked, referring to the cigarette brands that had been one of Finland’s most popular for many decades. “I know a few guys by that nickname, but I don’t think any of them served time in the last year. Korhonen had to have heard about it after June 2010.”

Mӓkelӓ
spoke up. “Are you sure your informant hasn’t made up the prison story to get you off his scent?”

“I’m sure,” Suhonen said. “If he had killed her, he would’ve said so. And if he wanted to conceal
it, he wouldn’t have told me anything about it in the first place.”

“That makes sense,”
Mӓkelӓ said. “But it shouldn’t be hard to find out. Let’s go over the list of guys who served a sentence with Lauri Korhonen.”

“I’ve got that list,” Joutsamo said and showed him the
document. “Korhonen was in Helsinki prison from September to December 2010 and another stretch from February to March this year. The prison gave me his cell mates’ names.”

Joutsamo passed out copies.
The list had more than ten names: Malmberg, Pesonen, Mölsӓ, Saarinen, Aarnio, Kinnunen, Lyytinen, Sandström, Pentikӓinen, Cuchna, Leikas, Talja, and Holopainen.

While t
he others were looking at the list, Joutsamo continued, “I checked everyone’s information and nobody listed had the nickname Nortti. Not even close. There was Tanka, Mocha, Rask, Mics, Ronda, and Hole…but none that would remotely sound like Nortti, a smoke, or even North.”

“What if it wasn’t a cell mate, but just someone in the same unit?”
Nykänen suggested.

“We’ll check that next.”

“We had an Aarnio in the Korpivaara case,” Kulta said, looking at the list. “But it may not be the same man.”

“No, ours was Mikael,” Joutsamo said, shaking her head. “The cell mate is Kimmo
Aarnio. Mikael didn’t have a criminal record. Same last name, different guy.”

“Did you search the database by nickname?”
Nykänen asked.

Joutsamo handed out another list.

“We got 213 hits. The records show about two hundred criminals by the nickname of Nortti.”

“Anybody from the Turku area?” asked
Vuori from Mӓkelӓ’s team, speaking for the first time.

“Frankly, I haven’t had a chance to look.”

“I understand,” Vuori said with a nod and took the list.

* * *

Nea Lind sat in a Mercedes taxi that was going north from Hakamӓki Street onto the Hämeenlinna Freeway and speeding up.

Lind was confused.
Korpivaara had told her straight out that he didn’t kill Laura Vatanen, but he was willing to serve the sentence. Why? Who was he trying to protect? She needed to know. Her first instinct was to go to the office and write up a report, but this wasn’t about taxes. It was a criminal case that she had to investigate and not just interpret.